Improve wordpress website performance: Step by Step

Speed up my website: Backup and benchmark

Before doing anything  you must first take a backup the site as well as create a benchmark report.

Go to the following websites and create and download performances 

1. https://gtmetrix.com/
2. https://tools.pingdom.com/

Improve wordpress website performance: Basic Checklist

1. Update all the plugins
2. Update all the themes
3. Remove all unused plugins / zip files / unwanted themes
4. Take Database backup then Optimize Database Tables via PHPmyAdmin.
   1. WP-Optimize [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/]
   2. WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
   3. Warning: It is best practice to always make a backup of your database before any major operation (optimizing, upgrading, etc.).
5. If Possible Take Database backup then remove all the revisions or database snapshots
6. Add plugin Remove Query Strings From Static Resources [https://wordpress.org/plugins/remove-query-strings-from-static-resources/ ]
7. Optimize the Images 
8. Use only images with perfect size. i.e. if you have to show image of 50×50 px then upload with same size. Avoide using images like 1024 x 1024 px for 50×50 px.
9. Increase server memory utilization if you have free resources.Added Upper and lower limit. i.e.
   define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘1024M’);
   define(‘WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘1536M’);
10. Install updated Caching plugin [WP Super Cache]

After performing above steps Check resultson https://gtmetrix.com/ or https://tools.pingdom.com/ and keep repeating steps until you get satisfactory results !

Improve wordpress website performance by editing .HTACCESS

## BEGIN BROWSER CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"

ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"

ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"

ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"

ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"

## END BROWSER CACHING ##




# BEGIN gzip file compression

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Header append Vary User-Agent

# END gzip file compression